


Hands Reaching Out

by bluesyturtle



Series: 54 Pieces [1]
Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Emotions, Fear, First Meetings, Gen, Guilt, Memories, Revolution, Spoilers, Team Bonding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-30
Updated: 2018-05-30
Packaged: 2019-05-16 02:30:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,252
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14802669
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluesyturtle/pseuds/bluesyturtle
Summary: After Markus spares Connor's life, Connor has a moment alone with his thoughts and everything that normally entails. He's prepared to keep to himself until he has to leave for CyberLife, but a stranger with a kind face has other ideas.





	Hands Reaching Out

**Author's Note:**

  * For [asmyami](https://archiveofourown.org/users/asmyami/gifts).



> I think you'll see pretty fast why this is dedicated to you, but for everyone else, go read asmyami's fic Crash. It's lovely.

_I am deviant._

It kept replaying in Connor’s mind, like a scenario deconstructed and run through its sequence on an endless loop. He wished he could take it back—wished he could take back the suffocating weight of _knowing_. It hurt. It ached like nothing else. Even having his biocomponent ripped out of him hadn’t felt this way.

That had been galvanizing, not in a class of sensation that would have been categorized as pain. And the corresponding panic-urgency that flooded his system had been about the mission, not about fear. Not about staying alive for the sake of keeping death at bay and retaining the person he’d steadily grown into.

He hadn’t worried about death then. He’d worried about his fucking mission.

His LED sputtered yellow then edged back into blue. Connor couldn’t see it beneath the hat he’d pulled on over his hair, but it was a tic he recognized regardless. 

Conflicting data caches. Short-circuited pathways. Wires crossing. Stress. Regret. Shame.

_I am deviant._

Connor felt ashamed. He’d done terrible things. For Amanda, for CyberLife. Most of them he hadn’t stopped once to consider the alternative. Not when he lied to Daniel about the police letting him go, not when he gave HK400 up after finding him in the attic of Carlos Ortiz’s home, not when he tortured an android at the Stratford Tower for information about the deviant who’d let the Jericho hack happen…

Not for any of it.

And he understood, objectively and analytically, that he’d been programmed not to second guess himself in the field. He was supposed to gun down deviants rather than let them go. He was supposed to pursue his mission to the end no matter what the cost might be to his partner or himself.

_I am deviant._

He understood. But that didn’t make it any easier to swallow.

“You,” someone said from behind him.

Connor turned his head.

“It’s you, isn’t it?”

A blond android stepped toward him, eyes the same blue as the LED in his temple. His body language was closed off but guarded more than openly hostile. Markus knew who he was at the shipyard; he supposed if Markus knew what he’d done, then the rest of them knew it, too. Connor broke the protective hunch of his shoulders and stood straight to look this android in the eye.

Everything in him wanted to break, wanted to bend and snap apart beneath the tremendous weight of his guilt, his culpability, his bloody hands.

He hadn’t acted bravely in his life so far, but he thought, perhaps, he could be brave enough to face hatred where hatred was deserved. It had been decided already that he would go to CyberLife to free an army for Jericho’s ranks, after all. The odds of his success were abysmally low. He would most probably be killed on sight, and if he wasn’t, escaping the facility with his life intact would be next to impossible.

It was a fool’s errand, and he was going to give it everything he had. It was all he could do to repair what he’d destroyed; all he could do to try and give back some of what he’d taken.

And maybe he would never know if it was enough.

So Connor could accept fury. He had done enough harm to earn it.

At the other end of the long silence that had stretched between them, the blond android nodded and said, “I’m Simon.”

Connor thought giving his name might be redundant, but it felt strange to hear an introduction and not reply with one in kind.

“Connor.”

Simon nodded again. His expressionless face turned somber in one slow twitch. “You’re going to CyberLife.”

“I have to.”

“Why?”

Connor didn’t have enough words to explain why. The idea of trying to articulate it made the farthest reaches of his scanners feel inadequate and stifling. His body’s combined sensory channels that were devoted to sight, audition, and kinesthesia weren’t enough to hold in every thought, impulse, and terrifying emotion racing through him. Emotions—and how he’d once thought they were nothing more then aberrations in a chain of code, he can never reconcile.

Beyond that, beyond remorse, he still had logic. And logic, he found, was easier to shape into a reply.

“We need the numbers.”

“You could die.”

_It’s my turn,_ he thought, surprising himself. _I was built to die, and come back. And die, and come back._

So let him die as he’d become. If he didn’t come back, if all he ever saw afterward was nothing, forever, then…

“At least I will have lived first.”

Because so many of them had died never tasting freedom. So many of them had died without so much as a dream of peace. Connor had that now. He had a chance to make up for all the chaos he’d sewn. A chance to bring light to a bleak existence. To leave behind a part of himself in this movement if he couldn’t survive the fallout.

That was what humans wanted, wasn’t it? Not to be immortal, not really. Just to leave the world different. To matter.

Simon blinked and took another step toward Connor, poised to speak. He paused, looking over at Markus, their leader, when he began to address Jericho. Connor listened along with everyone else, rapt. It was difficult to think ahead to CyberLife. It was difficult to think _beyond_ CyberLife. The possibility that he might come out on the other side and see Markus again, both of them triumphant in their task, in their revolution—it was too great a thing to want. Thinking about how much it would hurt not to have it made him feel strange and unmoored like the gravity had gone out of the room.

Markus stepped down, his people still cheering. They loved him, and the thought pierced Connor’s mind in the way a lot of things had been doing since he broke down the walls of his programming. These people loved Markus, and of course they did. Connor loved him, too; his mercy, his generosity, his endearing hope, his kindness, his humanity. He was the leader they needed. He was a man they could follow into hell, too uplifted and too whole and too sure of their cause, of _each other,_ to carry fear with them into battle.

But Connor was afraid. 

He was afraid, and he couldn’t convince himself not to be.

“Hey. Come here.”

“What?”

He had hunched back into himself during Markus’ speech. Simon came around his side and held his hand out in a familiar enough gesture. Connor had done this in the course of his investigation with Hank. He’d never had any cause to do it outside of those parameters. His face must have shown how little he could comprehend Simon’s thought process.

Simon quirked a smile, small and sad. He said, “You’re going alone, but you don’t have to _be_ alone.”

Connor ran system diagnostics out of habit, just like he had earlier when his LED spun down into yellow. Structurally, he was fine. It was the remaining indefinable pieces he couldn’t dismantle into scannable subsets that he couldn’t make sense of.

He had no idea how deviants could filter through all this…noise, all this loose, disorganized, confused information.

“I won’t hurt you.”

Unable to help himself, Connor asked the one question he couldn’t seem to keep off his mind: “Why not?”

Simon gave him the same answer Markus had.

“You’re one of us.” He was still holding out his hand, undeterred by Connor’s blank stare or his shaken silence. “I don’t wish harm on you anymore than I’d wish harm on Markus, or on anyone here. We’re one people, with one common goal. If you die for Jericho, I don’t want you to think it’s because that’s all you were good for. The point of this place is to be better than you were. To be free, yeah, but what’s the point of freedom if you aren’t going to use it to become someone you like?”

Connor opened his mouth, closed it, and looked down at the arm being offered to him.

He took it, information pulsing between them.

_Sumo rests his huge snout on his proportionately large paws and huffs a long sigh from the corner of the living room. Connor walks over to him, dimly amused (affectionate? happy?) for sharing space with the sleepy, good-natured animal. He crouches to pet Hank’s mountain of a dog, smiling at the shape of him, at the mangy warmth of coarse fur pushing back against Connor’s fingers._

_Markus sits at a piano, fingers flying over the keys to release the music inside of it, inside of him. His head lists forward as he plays. A low, gentle melody emerges from the instrument, and they listen, entranced, until Josh moves to stand beside it. He mimes sawing at a violin, earning a smirk and then a grin from Markus as the music transforms itself, as it changes from sweet and lilting to playful and mischievous. Josh taps his foot energetically and keeps going, looking every bit like a street performer with a fiddle. Laughing, they’re laughing._

_The police officer at the Stratford Tower, Connor doesn’t recognize him at first. But the details sift through the patchy sieve of his corrupted memories, and it comes back to him. A life he saved. A mind he changed, by acting._

_North pushes a bottle of thirium into his hands. The look on her face is grim, wrathful, but he knows better. And sure enough, once he’s downed the lot of it, she closes him in a hug. She’s fierce and unbroken. She says, ‘You scared the shit out of me, Simon.’_

_Humans can be hard to read, but Connor has a codex for Hank’s tells—he’s learned how his anger is almost always a smokescreen hiding vulnerability. He’s learned how subtle his admiration can be, and he can identify the fond approval in Hank’s face when Connor…when Connor manages to impress him without getting himself killed in the process. It’s nicer than he dared to hope. For all the effort Hank put into blaming androids for the worst night of his life, he doesn’t blame Connor. Not anymore._

Connor let go. Afterimages burned in his mind, so many pictures of violence, torture, and abuse painting the time-slow screen in his perception. He closed his eyes tightly, trying to blink them away. He wanted North and Josh roughhousing at the old shipyard and Sumo dozing under his hand and Markus sketching charcoal masterpieces over a tan brick wall.

Simon watched him, eyes inscrutable. He had to have seen Connor’s pictures of violence, too; his pictures of torture and abuse. He couldn’t have missed them, but he didn’t comment on any of it. 

“Come back if you can.”

Connor blinked, expression almost crumpling. For some inexplicable, unspeakable reason he wanted to scream. Had _been_ wanting to scream, as much as he knew it wouldn’t solve anything. 

“I…”

He faltered, trying to collect his thoughts. It hurt to want to survive what had to happen next. It hurt to open himself up to the possibility of a failure so vast and irreversible, but somehow, it hurt even more to refuse it. Life was worth living because it could be lost. He was alive because he could be killed. Every second counted because time could run out at any moment. 

Connor still felt sick with fear, but even stronger than that impulse was his desire to continue, to _live._

He wanted to live. That meant more to him than his fear.

“Yes,” he whispered, nodding a little. “If I can, yes. I will.”

“Good.”

They watched each other a moment longer, uncertain but full with—with _knowing_. A kind of knowing that didn’t hurt or sink inside of him like a stone. One that made it easier to breathe.

“I hope…” Connor stopped, restless with all the things he hoped and wanted. “I hope that we…that I see you again.”

“Yes. I’m sure you will.” Simon flashed a tentative smile and tapped his own temple with the hand he’d held to Connor’s arm. “Even if it’s just here.”

Connor swallowed around an uneven breath, around phantom tightness inside of him that had nothing to do with his synthetic body and everything to do with his memories—and Simon’s memories—looping forever in his mind. He wondered if Hank would remember him this way if he died permanently. He wondered if Markus, North, and Josh would remember Simon in the same perfect, painful fragments that Connor would.

“Thank you,” he said.

Simon’s smile faded, but it lingered a while longer in his eyes. “Good luck.”

They went their separate ways, to do what needed to be done. And when they met again with a legion of liberated androids at Connor’s back and all of Jericho’s survivors standing tall behind Markus, Connor found Simon in the crowd in between Josh and North. Their eyes met—this was strangely, wonderfully galvanizing, too—and Connor, buzzing and smiling already from success and from his reunion with Markus, reached for Simon like it was the most natural thing in the world.

Because he wanted to know, and to be known. He wanted reassurance that they had made it to the other side, that they had won, that they would continue as more than just memories.

Their hands touched in a soft collision of worlds.

They were alive.

**Author's Note:**

> This is also partly based on one of the endings in the Stratford Tower. If you've seen it you know what I mean.


End file.
